The Arms of the Galaxy
by Audra Rose
Summary: Don's thoughts about his brother. Please note that this was published on live journal a year ago, but as it's been suggested to me a number of times that I post it here, I thought I'd finally do it. I apologize if you've read it before.


Note: I don't think Charlie's string trick is physically possible without a loom or something, but I'd appreciate it if you'd just give it to me. :)

The Arms of the Galaxy

by Audra Rose

Charlie is still pacing; has been pacing for at least fifteen minutes, in fact, and Don thinks that he is slowly losing his mind. It's not the pacing itself – it's the fact that the elevator only has enough room for Charlie to take three measured steps before he reaches the wall, which he taps with both palms before pausing and then turning back in the other direction.

Step, step, step. Tap, pause, turn. Repeat.

While Charlie walks he flexes his fingers, subtly, down at his sides. No one else would notice, probably, but Don does and he sighs.

At first Don's parents thought Charlie might be autistic. Don doesn't think about this very often because by the time Charlie turned three no one could shut him up, but there had been a time before that when the word came up a lot.

Don was seven when Charlie was two and though at the time Don didn't understand what "autistic" meant exactly, he'd figured that it had something to do with why Charlie didn't really talk very much and why he would rather look at the sun patterns on the wall than at the toys in front of him. Sometimes he flapped his hands and made noises that didn't resemble words, and Don knew that worried his parents, too. They were afraid that whatever Charlie saw inside his mind was more interesting than what was going on around him, and that someday he might just decide to stop looking outward at all.

Don knew they didn't need to worry, though. He could make Charlie laugh. If Charlie ever went too far, or stayed away too long, Don could always bring him back with funny faces and silly sounds. As long as he could make Charlie laugh, as long as he could make Charlie see him, he knew that Charlie would be okay.

A little while after that Charlie had started to talk incessantly, continuously. The hand flapping had gone away as his nervous system caught up with his brain and he was able to express the thoughts that flew at warp speed through his mind. The word never came up again, and Don only remembers their initial fear when that subtle, flexing motion returns - usually whenever Charlie is agitated or bored. Or both.

Like now.

"They're working on the problem, Charlie. You need to calm down," Don says from his seat on the floor.

"Claustrophobic," Terry says, following Charlie's steps with her eyes.

"Not really," Charlie says, stopping to look at her. "Maybe slightly concerned about gravity at the moment –"

"Not you, me. I am. Claustrophobic, that is. And you're using up all the air."

"Terry, that's impossible," Don says, sighing. "This elevator isn't air tight. Don't freak out."

Charlie sinks down in one smooth motion, sitting to face them, legs crossed easily in front of him.

"Theoretically, we really could run out of air," he says, musing. "Or oxygen, anyway. Not quickly enough to actually suffocate, of course, but if you assume we're using oxygen faster than the limited circulation can replace it, I suppose that if we were here long enough we could –"

"Charlie?" Don says.

"Yeah?"

"Not helping."

They both look over at Terry, whose clear, green eyes are narrowed and fierce, glaring at Charlie as if their current predicament is his fault. Don hopes Charlie will remember that Terry is in fact, armed, and could decide to shoot a few air-holes into the ceiling if provoked.

"Do you want to play a game?" Charlie asks after a second.

"What kind of game?" Terry asks, still sounding edgy.

Charlie is digging in his back pack and doesn't answer right away. "Here it is," he announces, holding something up.

"Kite string?" Terry asks, skeptical.

"Why do you have kite string?" Don asks, not really surprised.

"Larry," Charlie says, as if this explains everything, and Don shrugs. It probably does.

"Do you have anything I can use to cut this?" Charlie asks, and Don pulls out his car keys, sawing through the soft, cotton string where Charlie holds it up.

"What kind of game?" Terry repeats as Charlie knots the string. Then he wraps it around his hands and holds them apart in front of her.

"Voila. Cat's cradle."

Terry looks at Charlie for a second like he's nuts, but then she laughs, her tension fading and Don has to smile, too. He watches them pass the string back and forth between their hands in increasingly complicated patterns, until finally Terry holds her hands out in front of him, an amused smile on her face.

Don lifts an eyebrow and shakes his head. "I don't think so."

"Oh, come on – what's the matter, Donny?" she says teasingly. "Above playing a children's game with your brother?"

"No, I just know better than to play cat's cradle with someone who can do fractal geometry in his head."

Terry looks like she's considering the validity of this point when Charlie says, "That reminds me. I want to try something."

"Uh-oh," Don says.

"Don't worry, it's not complicated. I need both of you for this, though. Put out your hands."

Terry places her hands out immediately, palms up, and when Don hesitates Charlie looks up at him in affectionate exasperation.

"Come on, Don. Don't be a dick. Put your hands out."

"Yeah, Don," Terry says, "Don't be a dick."

"You know, I'm really glad mom and dad stopped after Charlie," Don says, sighing as he places his hands across from Terry's.

"Okay, now just hold still," Charlie says, and with that begins to wind the string from the spool around their fingers in a complicated pattern that Don loses track of before it makes one complete circuit around their hands.

"What are we doing here, Charlie?" Don asks after a minute. "Knitting a sweater?"

"Just be patient." Charlie is biting his lower lip in concentration, and Don sees that he has his game face on, an expression that somehow manages to be both sharply focused and far-away at the same time.

"I didn't know CalSci had Arts and Crafts classes," Terry murmurs, and then it happens, what Don has been waiting for, what Don knew was coming, what always comes.

Terry glances up under her lashes and gives him "the look" - that complicit, amused glance that could mean "Isn't Charlie cute?" or "Isn't he amazing?" or "Isn't he just fucking weird?" but which always means that Charlie is different; Charlie is "other", and it shuts Charlie out.

Terry's teasing is okay, it's "the look" that bothers Don, so he returns it with the one he's had most of a lifetime to practice in response. He keeps his face blank, expressionless, gives nothing back that would complete the circle. He hasn't always done this for Charlie, and remembering that always makes him ashamed.

When he was young he used to reflect the look back – cute or amused or just fucking weird - because if Charlie was outside that usually meant that Don was in, that he wasn't strange like the weird Eppes kid. He reflected the look back until the day he realized that the reason Charlie rarely looked up when he spoke was that even if he didn't understand why, he knew exactly what the look meant. That made Don want to hit people.

Before Don can complain about how his wrists are starting to hurt Charlie sits back and curves his hands beneath Don's and says, "Lift up. Slowly! Slowly." He stops Don's hands slightly above Terry's, then reaches out to pinch the center of the winding mass of string.

"Here goes nothing," he whispers, and pulls up at an angle.

"Oh, God," Terry says softly. "Charlie, it's beautiful. What is it?"

Charlie smiles with pleasure, looking at the fragile, curving web suspended between their fingers. "It's a three-dimensional representation of phi."

"Pi?" Don asks.

"No, phi. N squared n plus one."

"What?"

"God's proportion," Terry says, still staring at the string. She looks up when she realizes they are staring at her in shock.

She shrugs. "Da Vinci Code."

"Oh," says Charlie, obviously nonplussed. "Well, that's exactly right. In Renaissance times this was called the Divine Proportion. It shows up all over; in music, in art, and everywhere in nature. It's in a nautilus shell, human DNA… even the arms of the galaxy."

Don glances up at Charlie, sees the distance there.

"Wow," Don says. "And we made one out of string."

Charlie laughs, as Don knew he would, and says, "Well, not exactly. I didn't measure – for this to be accurate each succeeding section would need to be exactly .618 times the size of the preceding section – this is just an approximation."

They stare at Charlie's approximation of God for awhile.

"This was really in the DaVinci Code?" Charlie asks, finally, tilting his head to the side. "Maybe I should read it."

"It's not really about math, you know," Terry says, but Don isn't listening.

Don is staring at the fragile structure, each spiraling section getting progressively smaller. He is thinking about his brother who can weave the galaxy out of string and who spends every day doing something that about 100 people in the world can appreciate and maybe a dozen can actually understand. He wonders what will happen as Charlie's work advances and those numbers get even smaller; wonders if Charlie will just get farther and farther away, like the arms of the galaxy spinning off into nothing.

In one swift movement Don collapses the fragile structure into a hopeless tangle, gripping Charlie's hands tightly, the intertwined string tying them together. Charlie is looking up at him, startled, but Don just watches him intently, searching.

"What's wrong?" Charlie asks.

"I really hated that book," Don says, and his voice sounds strange.

"Okay," Charlie says, sounding confused, but then he grins, and Don feels the knots inside loosen. He can still make Charlie laugh. He can still make Charlie see him. As long as he can do that, maybe there isn't any place Charlie can go where Don can't bring him back.

End


End file.
